Category: Beer

If head brewer and co-owner Tom Madden is worried about the change, he doesn’t show it – and talks about the expansion with eager optimism.

He has a reason to be confident. If Lone Pine had purchased equipment for a brewery of Sebago’s size, it would have spent months making decisions about how to set up the system and even more time attempting to test it and “do the math” to scale up its five-barrel recipes. But purchasing a working brewery’s equipment has a unique advantage. Its quirks and limitations are known, and its ability to produce excellent beer has already been realized in the hands of Sebago’s brewing and production staff.

Mast Landing and Battery Steele are releasing Ice Cream Imperial Stout, a new collaboration between the two breweries. The beer is brewed with “[h]undreds of waffle cones in the mash, lactose and a bucket of sprinkles in the boil, then conditioned on vanilla beans.”

Battery Steele also plans to release Onsight #3, which they describe as an “Oat IPA (6.5%) heavily hopped with Galaxy, Nelson and Rakau. Very soft, almost no bitterness and busting with notes of passion fruit, pineapple, mango and hints of pine”.

Bissell Brothers is releasing Preserve & Protect, “a 7.8% IPA built off the blueprint of our 4th-anniversary one-off. This beer gives us a chance to utilize the pineapple flavors of Denali on a larger base, with background support from Citra and Vic Secret. The label features an illustration by Heidi Geist featuring our father, recently retired as director of Baxter State Park”.

This international marketing strategies appear to be paying off. Coles says sales of the American Pale Ale have grown 30%, year over year in the UK- 50% for the IPA. Marston’s even has plans to lead a group of visitors from the U.K. to Portland later this year in order to visit the original birthplace of Shipyard.

A new brewery called the Definitive Brewing Co. (website, facebook, instagram, twitter) is now under construction at 35 Industrial Way across the street from Allagash. Definitive Brewing plans to open this Spring.

The state’s thriving beer industry mirrors national trends in which female brewers are a distinct minority. But as more women develop a taste for the product, the boys’ club door has been swinging open.

The article indicate that Shonee Strickland will be the head brewer at Brickyard Hollow Brewing Company when it opens in Yarmouth.